After years of anticipation, months of preparation and weeks of frenzied hype, Facebook's shares barely budged Friday in their Wall Street debut.

From an initial public offering price of $38, its stock ended the day at $38.23 after more than half a billion shares, a record, changed hands.

Still, while those looking for a huge pop in the social network's share price were disappointed, the company and some early investors raked in $16 billion. And Facebook, at $104 billion, ended the day among the most valuable companies in the country.

"Normally for an IPO, you expect a 15 to 20 percent pop," said Arvind Bhatia, a tech analyst with the Sterne Agee investment firm. "It's certainly a little bit surprising and disappointing. At the same time, you could give kudos to the underwriters because they priced it pretty close to where it's trading."

The mixed outcome raised debate over whether the world's leading social networking site can have a coattail effect for other tech startups. While the billions raised in the IPO are certain to help lift Silicon Valley's economy -- spurring new home and car purchases and even investments in new companies -- it may not give much of a boost to other IPOs.

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Google's (GOOG) stock rose 18 percent on its first day of trading in 2004. Some investors had speculated Facebook's would rise much higher, after other social networking companies such as LinkedIn and Groupon showed double-digit percentage gains in their recent debuts.

But Facebook's first-day performance, up 0.6 percent, was solid, said Henry Blodget, who during the dot-com era was one of the most high-profile Internet stock analysts.

"Facebook could not have been clearer that it is focused on the long haul," he said. "If anyone bought the IPO looking for a quick score and now feels burned, they have only themselves to blame."

As an indication of how much interest the stock had attracted, Friday's trading set a record for the number of shares sold -- about 581 million -- on a company's opening day. Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang Friday's opening bell for the Nasdaq stock exchange on a stage set up outside at the company's Menlo Park headquarters, where he was joined by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and dozens of other employees.

Facebook and its underwriters chose $38 as the IPO price, at which underwriters could sell to preferred clients before trading began. After a half-hour delay in trading due to unexplained glitches in the Nasdaq trading system, early jockeying drove the official opening price to $42.05. But the price quickly fell, then rose and fell again through the day.

Other social media companies had a tough day, with Zynga off more than 13 percent, Yelp down more than 12 percent, Groupon lower by nearly 7 percent and LinkedIn sagging nearly 6 percent. And the stock market as a whole suffered, with the major indexes all down and the Dow suffering its worst week since late November.

Facebook had increased the potential range of the IPO price earlier this week and then chose the high end of the range, while also increasing the amount of shares that would be sold.

But the opening price Friday indicated surprisingly soft demand, according to Max Wolff, an analyst with Greencrest Capital in New York, who noted that shares had been trading slightly above that, roughly $44 per share, in the secondary markets that allow employees of privately held companies to sell their shares.

Wolff and others said the price stayed above $38 in part because the underwriters and other big investors had put in place automated "buy" orders at that price. It's not unusual for underwriters to do that, according to several analysts, although it's a precaution that's not typically needed.

Paul Santinelli, a venture capitalist with North Bridge Venture Partners, said that had Facebook's stock doubled out of the gate, it would have prompted soaring valuations for other private companies and set lower-quality startups toward the public markets.

"This is a good lesson for companies that are out there thinking they deserve multibillion valuations," said Santinelli, who's been skeptical of the high valuations for many Web 2.0 startups. "I think what this will do is force people to rethink what a public company really is."

Still, he was among those praising Facebook's underwriters for pricing the stock appropriately, and he predicted that after a few quarters of growth, the stock will regain loft, driven in part by Facebook's opportunities to grow revenue from users of mobile phones.

Indeed, almost lost in the hype surrounding the IPO was news that Facebook had acquired another startup, San Francisco-based Karma, which lets mobile users buy and ship gifts to their Facebook friends.

The IPO's financial impact is already being felt around Silicon Valley, where real estate agents have reported Facebook employees bidding up the price of upscale homes. And it was sure to cement the status of Facebook's 28-year-old CEO as a next-generation icon.

Even after selling 30 million shares to pay his tax bill, Zuckerberg's remaining 503 million shares are worth more than $19 billion; that makes him richer than Google CEO Larry Page, whose wealth was estimated at $18.7 billion by Forbes this spring. But Jonathan Taplin, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, said Zuckerberg's wealth is not the reason for his appeal.

"Zuckerberg is a cultural phenomenon," Taplin said, adding that many of his 20-something students look up to the young CEO. "People are amazed by the utility of what he's created."

Facebook's astounding growth -- from its inception in a Harvard dorm room eight years ago to its current base of more than 900 million users around the world -- is changing the way people interact on both a personal and a commercial level.

While the company reported $1 billion in profit last year on revenue of $3.7 billion, experts say its business model is still developing and faces many risks.

But having a Facebook presence is increasingly important to businesses as well as individuals, said Rebecca Lieb, a digital media consultant with Altimeter Group. "One thing that keeps people on Facebook is the fact that everybody else is on Facebook."